On the night of March 5, 1770, a crowd of Boston colonists confronted a small group of British soldiers on King Street. Words were exchanged. Tension had been building for months — British troops had been stationed in Boston since 1768, and the friction between occupying soldiers and colonial residents had grown volatile. When the confrontation escalated and the soldiers opened fire, five men were killed. The first to fall was Crispus Attucks — a man of African and Native American descent, a sailor and rope worker who had escaped slavery twenty years earlier and had been living as a free man in the maritime economy of colonial New England. He was the first person to die in what would become the American Revolution. The country he died for would not legally recognize the freedom of people who looked like him for another ninety-five years.
Almost nothing is known about Crispus Attucks with certainty, and that uncertainty is itself part of the record. He was born around 1723, most likely in Framingham, Massachusetts. His father was likely of African descent — possibly an enslaved man — and his mother was likely a Natick Wampanoag woman. In 1750 a runaway slave advertisement was placed in the Boston Gazette describing a man named Crispus who had escaped from his enslaver in Framingham — tall, with short curly hair, working in the maritime trades. Whether this was the same Crispus Attucks who died on King Street twenty years later is not definitively established, but most historians accept the identification. If it is the same man, then the first person to die for American independence was a formerly enslaved man who had spent two decades building a free life for himself in defiance of the legal system his death would help dismantle.
The Boston Massacre, as it was immediately named and publicized by colonial propagandists including Paul Revere, became one of the most effective pieces of revolutionary agitation in American history. Revere’s famous engraving of the event — depicting orderly British soldiers firing into a crowd of peaceful colonists — was reproduced and distributed throughout the colonies. Crispus Attucks appears in the engraving, but his racial identity was not highlighted in the revolutionary propaganda. The usefulness of his death to the patriot cause was as a martyr for colonial freedom, not as evidence of Black participation in the founding struggle. John Adams, defending the British soldiers at trial, described the crowd as a collection of “Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars” — using Attucks’s presence to argue that the crowd was a disreputable mob. The same man whose death launched a revolution was used, within that revolution, as evidence of its unworthiness.
The erasure of Crispus Attucks from the center of the American founding narrative was not accidental. The revolutionary generation needed a story of white colonists fighting for freedom — not a story of a Black man dying for a country that would continue to enslave his people. The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 with language about self-evident equality that its author did not intend to apply to people like Attucks. The Constitution of 1787 protected the institution of slavery that had held Attucks or his father in bondage. The new nation that Attucks’s death helped bring into being immediately set about constructing the legal architecture that would deny freedom to Black Americans for the next century. His sacrifice was accepted. His humanity was not.
The historical reclamation of Crispus Attucks has been uneven and incomplete. In 1888 a monument to the victims of the Boston Massacre was unveiled on Boston Common — the first public monument in the United States to honor Black Americans. Frederick Douglass spoke at the dedication. In the twentieth century, Attucks became an important symbol in the civil rights movement — his name was given to schools, community centers, and institutions across the country as a reminder that Black Americans had been present at the founding and had died for the nation’s freedom before the nation existed. Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, founded as a segregated Black school in 1927, produced Oscar Robertson and became one of the most celebrated high school basketball programs in American history. The name chosen for that school was not chosen by accident. It was chosen because the people who named it understood exactly what Crispus Attucks represented — the first American, the forgotten founder, the man whose death was used and whose life was erased.